Word: ozawa
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...challenging. Mahler's repertoire requires spiritual empathy as well as technical delicacy. A conductor must look at life and try to see what Mahler saw--a combination of fear, ennui and child-like wonder. Unsurprisingly, an exquisite performance of Mahler is moving--but rare. And so, when conductor Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (B.S.O.) performed one of Mahler's final (and arguably, most perfect) pieces, the vocal accompanied Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), they achieved two feats. Not only did the BSO lead us to Mahler's own spiritual crossroad--the dark hinterland...
...thrives under something rare in the classical music world--a long-reigning conductor. In his 26th year as music director, Seiji Ozawa is currently the world's longest serving conductor of any major orchestra. With Ozawa at its helm, the BSO attains a balance that might seem impossible for other contemporary symphonies--a balance between high sales in tickets and high quality in programming. The process of choosing a repertoire can be as political as it is musical, an inimical intersection between the vision of a governing board concerned with fund raising and a conductor concerned with musical integrity...
...Miraculous Mandarin, Bartok's own exploration of life and death. This one act opus was more of a pantomime than a musical suite. In fact, it was almost a miniature play. While there were no actors, no costumes, no sets, there was one staple of drama--an unmistakable storyline. Ozawa took the role of the narrator and the instruments assumed the voices of characters. The Miraculous Mandarin's format was vaguely reminiscent of the children's symphony, Peter and the Wolf. Its plot, however, was drastically different. The Miraculous Mandarin unravelled in the salacious milieu of a brothel bedroom, where...
...highlight of the concert, however, came after intermission with the performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, his adaptation of Hans Bethge's collection of translated poems The Chinese Flute. At this point, Ozawa was not only conducting the BSO, but also two singers, Ben Heppner and Thomas Quastoff, who rounded out the tenor and bass-baritone voice parts. The work was divided into five parts that explored a different facet of Mahler's self-contemplation. In the first piece, known as the "drinking song," a man laments that "Dark is life, dark is death" and copes...
...Ozawa arrived on stage early--early enough, in fact, to take the podium for the third movement as well as the fourth. The audience thundered applause, and paused the symphony for several grateful minutes. Ozawa's direction of the third "slow" movement and the final movement was much more luxurious than Cortese's probably would have been; Ozawa somehow hovered over the orchestra, distilling each phrase into crystalline clarity and infusing his boundless energy into the performers. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus and superb cast of soloists carried the "Ode to Joy" theme to breathtaking heights of expression, and the audience...